New sound card and monitors...

[Convex]

Hey guiz, I need some help. I'm gonna get me a new laptop for music soon cos my pc has recently decided to give up, but I'm also looking to get some decent, but fairly cheap monitors. My budget for monitors is only about £150 max, and I'm aware that this wont get me anything amazing, but it will be much better than using awful computer speakers for production. I'm also looking to buy an external sound card, but I dont know how much i will be able to spend on one, so any guidance is appreciated, but i probably wont be able to afford much after buying a laptop...

If anyone could give me any suggestions from their experience for either of these things, I'd be very happy :)

[Offgore]

At 1/17/10 11:40 AM, Convex wrote:

:ut i probably wont be able to afford much after buying a laptop...

If anyone could give me any suggestions from their experience for either of these things, I'd be very happy :)

M-Audio BX5a Monitors

These ones are actually quite good and they are just under 150 pounds, although they will charge you a bit extra for delivery and such. I just ordered them yesterday and I can't wait for them.

[Mystery-Moon-Pie-Aud]

Arent pounds worth more than dollars? So he will end up paying more than 150 dollars?

[Krank]

At 1/17/10 11:56 AM, Mystery-Moon-Pie-Aud wrote: Arent pounds worth more than dollars? So he will end up paying more than 150 dollars?

the guy used the euros symbol when he mentioned his budget.

I highly recommend the bx5a's, I have that exact pair. Also you will really, REALLY want to invest in a pair of mopads with those badboys. and don't forget the trs cables you will need to hook it all up. a little more than 150 euros fro the monitors but well worth it!

[thecoreman]

For the external soundcard, I'd go with U-CONTROL UCA 200. Cheap and efficient.

[Khuskan]

My choice of external soundcard is the M-Audio Audiophile USB. It includes 2 inputs and 2 outputs (both phonos), 2 mono jack inputs and SPDIF in/out, as well as a very good quality built in headphone amp with stereo jack output and midi in/out.

It also has hardware ASIO, which is pretty much essential if you're producing on a windows-based platform, and drivers are available for pretty much all operating systems, OSX, linux and windows, including win7.

Pretty cheap, for what it is. Only real downside is that it requires its own power supply, which means you have to be tethered to a power point to use it, but the benifits of that result in a very good signal-to-noise ratio on input and output.

As for reasonably priced monitors, have a look at m-audio and mackies collections. Don't just buy based on internet reviews, get into a music shop where you can actually see and test them first hand.

[BrokenDeck]

When using USB or Firewire instead of a PCI or PCI-E interface, you will have a significant amount of additional lag time between the keypress and the actual output of the sound, in some cases as much as 20-40 ms more lag. My advice would be to avoid laptops for audio production all together. A Core2 based- tower system is soooooooo cheap these days now that i3-based systems are out. Get a PCI or PCI-E pro-sumer card with the money you saved from NOT buying a notebook/laptop. There are some that are zero latency, which is ideal and not that expensive anymore, just hard to get. FOr starters, might I suggest Creative's EMU based systems, such as the 1212. They are very cheap these days, like 150-350 US dollars. But you'd have to import from the US.

[Convex]

Ooh thanks for all the replies, I've had a look into everyones suggestions,

The Bx5a monitors look pretty good, cheap, and seem to have positive reviews. Providing I dont see anything else, I will most probably go for these.

Also you will really, REALLY want to invest in a pair of mopads with those badboys.

Already intending on getting em :)

The M-Audio Audiophile USB soundcard looks like exactly what i need, and again, seems to have positive reviews, and seems cheap for what it does, so I will probably go with that. Im not too bothered that it needs its own power supply.

As for getting a desktop over a laptop, my reasons for getting a laptop are portability and in the future, I hope to start performing live, so I think a laptop would be best suited to me. I'm gonna try and get the best processer on it that I can, and lots of tasty ram, so hopefully it will be able to handle it...I hope...But I dont know that much about computers :S

Anyway, thanks everyone :)

[Khuskan]

At 1/17/10 03:48 PM, brokendeck wrote: When using USB or Firewire instead of a PCI or PCI-E interface, you will have a significant amount of additional lag time

You've obviously had -very- bad experience with cheap USB/Firewire soundcards.

On my laptop running windows, ASIO can bring my latency down to 1ms via my USB card. The studio I use also has a 64 channel rack-mount firewire audio system that has <1ms latency.

USB 2.0 hardware latency is measurable only in microseconds, which are a magnitude smaller than milliseconds, which is what audio latency tends to be measured in. If you're getting high latency, either you're not using ASIO hardware acceleration, or your computer is really, really slow.

[BrokenDeck]

How many vsts are you running at the same time though? Or are you just recording live audio? Full orchestral vsts eat up ASIO buffers like crazy. :(